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This is the seventh issue of The Specification Layer.
This newsletter window: September 13
through September 20. Thirty-two specification
repositories and twenty-five feeds, all read clean for the
seventh consecutive week — no source errored. Two
working-group calls attended: the Arazzo bi-weekly on
Tuesday and the OpenAPI TDC weekly on Wednesday. 143 pull requests merged. 4 releases cut. 20 posts
published. Fifteen of the thirty-two specifications did not move at
all. The two release-path dependencies merged 6 between
them.
First, a correction. In four issues,
including the very first one, I described the OCI Image
Specification as stable with its "last merge in
2017." That is wrong. opencontainers/image-spec merged a pull request this week, has merged eight since
last September, and released v1.1.1 in March 2025. It is
stable and maintained, which is a better state
than the one I had it in, and I should have checked a
claim I was repeating every week against the repository it
was about. The four published issues now carry a dated
note; the standing note in my own method that seeded the
error is fixed.
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Deep beneath the neon grid, a small gold key sits on
its plinth beneath a long lit ramp, and a lone
figure has just lifted it and is carrying it up
toward the light, the rest of the vast hall dark and
still.
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The Lead: Five Hours After Nobody Would Decide, the Fix
Shipped
This is the third and, I think, last instalment of a story
I did not expect to run for three weeks.
Week of September 6: I reported that the
published OpenAPI 3.2 validation schema used \d in its version pattern, so under Python and .NET regex
engines openapi: 3.2.৪ — BENGALI DIGIT FOUR — validated. @karenetheridge had
already fixed it to [0-9] on the v3.2-dev branch. The first time this newsletter's "is
it published?" check came back yes.
Week of September 13: OpenAPI 3.2.1
shipped without it, and I read the OAI's contributing
rules before writing a word: "Patch releases cannot contain changes that
require a schema update." Schemas publish on their own track. Not a miss; a seam.
This week I sat in the room where the schema track is
decided, and the reason it had not moved was not policy. It was
a question about what date to write on a filename, and
nobody would answer it.
What I watched
The vehicle is spec.openapis.org #64, "publish v3.2-dev schema iterations" — the
pull request that puts the fixed schema on the site. Its
history is the first thing worth knowing: opened February 27, approved by @ralfhandl on February
28 and again on March 30, then untouched until
September. Five and a half months with two approvals.
On Wednesday's TDC call — Miguel Quintero running it
in Lorna's absence — Karen asked for it to be merged,
and said why: "They've been waiting for months to get
published. They didn't get published when we put
out the 3.2.1 spec, and I'd really like to be able
to unblock a lot of work that's waiting for
this."
The block was this. The publishing script dates each
schema file by the last time that file changed,
and fixes up the cross-references between files
accordingly. That is why the site had two 3.2 files
dated 2025-11-23 referencing two dated 2025-09-17. The script had run on August 30; some of the new files
came out dated 2026-02-26, because that was the last time those particular files
changed. Karen had pushed a second commit re-dating all
four to the same day, on the grounds that a reader looking
at a file dated February would reasonably think it had
been published in February, when in fact nobody could have
used it before now.
Henry Andrews, who wrote the script, would not take a
side, and said so about five different ways. He wanted one
thing: "I feel like the TSC should make decisions, and
this is one of the decisions the TSC should
make." And, more bluntly: "Things are falling on the floor because no one
wants to actually say anything."
Miguel: "I didn't realize there was a decision that
had to be made, so I wasn't avoiding making
one." Vincent Biret asked what the original rationale had
been, given that publishing four files costs nothing. Mike
Kistler restated the actual user problem: if you want
the latest set you take the newest dates, but if
you want a previous consistent set you have to
open the files and follow the references.
The call ran out of time. Miguel's close,
verbatim: "We didn't get too much done, but I just
wanted to make sure we were not hastily doing something
we would regret later on." Decision deferred to the TSC in Slack.
What happened next, from the pull request
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Sep 17, 15:44 UTC
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@handrews comments on #64: dates update only on
schemas that changed; the script handles the
cross-references.
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~16:00 UTC
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The call ends with no decision.
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21:03 UTC
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@karenetheridge: git reset --hard c077695 — "the original commit from the
workflow." She drops her re-dating commit and restores the
script's output.
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21:24 UTC
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Merged by @whitlockjc.
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Five hours and twenty-four minutes after the call ended
undecided, the question was resolved — not by the TSC
deciding, but by the person who raised it withdrawing it
so the work could ship.
The fix is live. As of this
morning, spec.openapis.org/oas/3.2/schema/2026-08-30 returns ^3\.2\.[0-9]+(-.+)?$. I ran the same test I ran three weeks ago:
Python re, published 2026-08-30 schema vs "3.2.৪" → does not match
3.2.৪ no longer validates against the current published
OpenAPI schema, in any engine. Three weeks from a
one-character fix on a dev branch to the artifact your
validator downloads.
And the thing Karen said would happen, happened
Look at the URL. The schema went live on September 17 and is dated August 30. The dialect and
meta files that shipped alongside it are dated February 26 — published on a Wednesday in September, carrying a date
from the previous winter. Anyone who reads the date in a
spec.openapis.org URL as "when this was
published" is now wrong by eighteen days on one file
and seven months on two others. That is precisely the
confusion Karen described on the call, and the OAI shipped
it rather than resolve it.
I am not scoring this against anyone. Every person on that
call was trying to get a correct artifact published, and
it got published. What I am recording is the
mechanism: a specification body's machine-readable artifacts
were blocked for five and a half months on a naming
convention, because the maintainer who could have
decided declined to on principle, and the body that
should have decided did not know it was being
asked. The unblock came from a contributor choosing to lose the
argument. Henry's sentence about things falling on
the floor was answered the same evening — by someone
picking one thing up.
The date question is still open. It will come up again the
next time a schema changes.
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A small underground chamber beneath the grid where a
handful of tiny figures stand around a low gold-lit
table on which a single small calendar-like slab
rests with one mark glowing, the vast dark
understructure rising away above.
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🎙 From the Room: Two Calls This Week
Third week of this section, and the first with two
meetings in the window. The OpenAPI repository merged zero
pull requests this week; the Arazzo repository merged six,
all bots. Read the repositories and both projects were
idle. Read the rooms and one of them set a release date
and the other nearly published its security model.
OpenAPI TDC weekly, September 17
Beyond the schema decision above — the whole second half
of the hour — three things.
Chris Wood's FAPI / GNAP security proposal is
about a day from a pull request. Roughly seven thousand words, in his fork, and he came
to the call for a sense-check rather than a review: "I don't want to operate in an echo chamber …
this has been my world for the last at least eight
years." The problem it addresses: OpenAPI can describe
the shape of a token or a credential, but not
the processing instructions — how a
client asking "how do I call GET /accounts" learns that it needs mTLS, a pushed authorization
request, authorization code with PKCE, and which claims to
send. His words: "the shape of objects is not easy but it's
there; it's the processing instructions and how the
thing is actually formed that we miss."
Three-part structure. Security broken out into its own specification — not required to make it work, but a separation of
concerns so specialists can own it. A profile framework, where something like FAPI 2 extends the security spec
by adding constraints rather than everything landing in
core. A registry of published profiles,
which he is "ambivalent" about but thinks is
worth having. Objects in the design: discovery (bringing
RFC 8414 metadata into scope), mTLS, JWT, credentials,
access requests, tokens, pushed authorization requests,
each carrying an implements-style pointer to its RFC so a human or an agent can
follow the graph. GNAP is being tested against the design
and may end up as a standalone security type rather than a
profile; he said that section is largely AI-generated for
now and will be marked unverified. The client-side
choreography he explicitly leaves to Arazzo's
actor-in-the-loop — "that belongs over there anyway." Henry, whose build-infra work depends on this landing,
had no questions. Miguel: "you're talking like seven RFCs."
I will report the pull request when it exists. This is the
largest design change proposed to OpenAPI's security
model that I am aware of, and it was presented to five
people on a Wednesday.
tools.openapis.org is being retired, with
a landing page to redirect to Phil Sturgeon's tools
site — Chris cannot maintain it and "every bot in the world" is tagging scaffolded projects with OpenAPI. Henry, in
chat: it "was a great design originally, but we just
don't have the resources to keep it up." As of this morning the site still returns 200 with no
redirect; the decision is announced, not executed. www.openapis.org is leaving WordPress for GitHub Pages on the framework SAP built for
events.openapis.org; content is migrated and the CNAME
move is waiting on the Linux Foundation. Vincent pointed
the group at two community-run event platforms, Guild.host
and Pretalx.
Moonwalk is "a little frozen." Miguel said it in the SIG round, unprompted. I have
reported Moonwalk silent for seven consecutive weeks, last
merge March 31, 2025, as the answer to "what is
happening with OpenAPI 4." That is now the OAI's
own description too.
The automated dev-branch sync is misbehaving. PR #5550 was left unmerged because a file was disappearing; Karen
approved it and said the exclusion "is not quite working and I'm not sure
why." Still open this morning, along with Lorna's #5553 improving the release instructions. Between the sync bug
and the schema block, that is the whole explanation for
OpenAPI's zero this week.
Arazzo bi-weekly, September 16
Arazzo 1.2 is targeted for mid-November. Frank Kilcommins opened with "around Halloween time
… end of October, at least into the first half of
November," and the group closed on mid-November. The
reasoning was cadence — releases should not be years
apart, and each should be small enough to adopt without a
project.
The release was split in the room, and nobody
objected. Kevin Duffey proposed, the group accepted: 1.2 = SOAP + Protobuf/RPC, end of October. 1.3 = GraphQL + actor-in-the-loop, end of year or end of January. Functions after that.
That is a plan I can grade.
SOAP got its two approvals the same day. On the call it was waiting on two re-reviews after a
late operationName change; Nick Denny started his live. #533 shows both @ndenny and @kevinduffey approving on September 16. The change is small: wsdl joins the sourceDescriptions type enum, WSDL 1.1 and 2.0 supported, a WSDL step
requires operationName, XPath already covers response validation. Frank
prioritised SOAP because two open-source tools had already
worked around the gap
themselves. Protobuf (#556) was broadened from gRPC to anything Protobuf describes
— gRPC, gRPC-Web, Connect. GraphQL (#567) is unreviewed. All four remain open; the plan is to
land them together.
Actor-in-the-loop, walked end to end. A
new interaction step type, not a pre-flight — Frank
tried the pre-flight approach and found it too confusing.
It carries a mode hint (form, acknowledgement, redirect), a prompt with runtime expressions, a context bag, an inputSchema in JSON Schema 2020-12 the executor must honour on
return, durations for timeout, and new onTimeout and onCancel actions. The examples in #568 include a full OAuth authorization-code handshake — what the OpenID Foundation participants asked for in
the original working group and 1.0/1.1 could not model.
Chris Wood reviewed those examples; read that next to his
proposal above, and the two groups are drawing the same
line from opposite sides. MCP is the next
flavour, blocked on servers being able to advertise their
tools up front.
Adoption. WSO2 is the first mainstream
gateway with public Arazzo support. Bump.sh implemented,
hit gaps, and built an alternative; the group's
answer is contribute back — async is already in
1.1, actor-in-the-loop is this pull request. Frank wants a
tooling-support list with vendor contacts so gaps become
issues instead of forks. I came away with two commitments:
an Arazzo tooling story series, and the conformance-test issue — I am running two runtimes side by side already, so I
will start with issues and work toward a pull request.
Method note, both calls: quotes are from
my notes; speaker attribution is reconstructed from
content, and anything carrying a claim was checked against
the repository record — the #64 timeline, the two SOAP
approvals, the four open Arazzo pull requests, the two
open OpenAPI pull requests. Personal matters raised on
either call, an internal design discussion not yet public,
and second-hand product rumours are excluded.
The split
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Who merged it
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Count
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Share
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copybara-service[bot]
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30
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21%
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dependabot[bot]
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13
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9%
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renovate[bot]
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10
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7%
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oai-spec-publisher[bot]
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3
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2%
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github-actions[bot]
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2
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1%
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All bots
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58
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41%
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Actual people
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85
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59%
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Seven readings: 59% machine, 54%, 72%, 59%, 36%,
41%, 41%.
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Merges
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Human
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Human share
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TRACE + PDPP
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34
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31
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91%
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The other thirty
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109
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54
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50%
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All thirty-two
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143
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85
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59%
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The established layer hit fifty percent human for the
first time. Three weeks ago it was 32%, then 43%, now 50%.
Fifty-four human merges across the thirty specifications
this newsletter started with — FDC3 fifteen, OpenTelemetry
ten, CALM nine, GraphQL five, Protobuf four, SPDX three.
Meanwhile TRACE and PDPP, which produced 92 merges three
weeks ago, produced 34 this week. The two young
repositories are slowing down and the old ones are
speeding up, and the headline is finally being carried by
the specifications the industry actually runs on.
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A foundation vault beneath the neon grid where one
great gold gate has just been closed and its lamps
switched off, while at the far end of the hall a
long-shuttered smaller gate has been thrown open
with warm gold light pouring out of it.
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📐 The Description Layer
GraphQL merged five, all by people, all on the same
afternoon — after six consecutive issues of
zero. Every week since August 9 I have recorded the merge
count for the two flagship description specs:
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Week ending
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OpenAPI
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GraphQL
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Aug 9 → Sep 13
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13, 12, 11, 7, 3, 9
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0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
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Sep 20
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0
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5
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graphql/graphql-spec landed all five on September 17, the
day of the working group's secondary EU meeting. Two change the language. #1227, "Allow empty selection sets" — the grammar goes from Selection+ to Selection*, and the PR opens: "Since 2015 we've required selection sets to
contain at least one field." Eleven years, reversed because a union with a
conditional fragment could already yield an empty object,
so the grammar forbade what execution allowed. #1211, "OneOf inhabitability" — fifty-three lines guarding against @oneOf input types that can be defined but never instantiated
(input A @oneOf { a: A }). Both Accepted (RFC 3), the final
stage. #894, defining "operation execution," was
opened October 18, 2021 and merged after
four years and eleven months. Two more are editorial.
The rule: these are on main. GraphQL's newest published edition is September 2025 and does not contain them; the continuously-built draft had not been rebuilt with them when I fetched it.
Accepted, in the draft line, not yet citable — and worth
knowing a week before anyone tells you. What six weeks of
"GraphQL merged nothing" actually meant: the
work batches behind a monthly working group and lands in
one afternoon. The repository was never quiet. It was just
batched.
OpenAPI: zero merges, and the schema story above is the
reason. The \d fix is published. The v3.3.0 board holds at 19/39 for a fourth week, still labelled
internal use only.
Overlay merged nothing for the second week running, and
its release vote is still open. Issue #392 cleared its two-thirds threshold on September 9 and has
now sat for twelve days on one condition — discussion #5538 on relative URI reference terminology, which has one
comment, no answer, and has not been touched since
September 9. The 1.2 milestone this newsletter has counted
at 7/7 for seven weeks is blocked on a question nobody has
answered. One thing did move: build-infra #53 from @lornajane added the main and in-progress Overlay
specifications to the qualification list, so the next
build-infra release will be tested against Overlay before
it tags.
Protocol Buffers shipped v36.2 on September 17 and merged 29, 25 of them copybara. The
one to note is #29840, adding Edition 2026 support to the upb_generator minitable plugin — Edition 2026 is
being assembled component by component in public and this
is another piece. Also #29869, which updates SECURITY.md to route DynamicMessage RCE and information-leak reports through GitHub Security
Advisories — a project stating in writing which class of
bug it treats as a security vulnerability.
JSON Schema merged nothing for a second week. AsyncAPI
merged nothing — its first fully silent week after six of
bots-only. Moonwalk: seventh consecutive week, last merge March
31, 2025. There is still no OpenAPI 4.
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A subterranean conduit hall beneath the grid where
four separate pipe runs each carry a fresh gold seal
clamped shut along their length, all four glowing,
tiny figures moving between them with tools.
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📡 Events, Telemetry and the Data Plane
OpenTelemetry cut v1.61.0 on September 14 and then spent the rest of the week
stabilising things. Thirteen merges, ten by people:
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#5211 — Prometheus → OTLP Info metrics
marked stable. The third Prometheus-exporter
stabilisation I have watched land in seven weeks, all
from @dashpole, all off written implementation
evidence.
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#5149 — Attribute and Attribute Collection representation
for non-OTLP marked stable, explicitly to unblock two Go SDK
issues, with the Go prototypes linked.
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#5305 — ForceFlush is now required in the periodic
exporting MetricReader's Shutdown. A SHOULD becoming a MUST, the opposite direction
from last week's propagator change, and both are
the specification tightening where implementations
converged and loosening where they did not.
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#5316 — OnEnding added to the SpanProcessor shutdown requirements.
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#5233 — an OTEP for Span type over OTLP,
651 lines from @lmolkova, proposing a dedicated field
so spans can be identified by type the way metrics are
by name. An OTEP is a proposal, not a decision, and I
am reporting it as one.
That is four stabilisations, one hardened requirement and
one design proposal in one week from a specification that
graduated in May. OpenTelemetry is the most consistently
productive project in this registry and it is not close.
Elsewhere in the family: the Kubernetes attributes processor reached v1.0.0, and OTLP merged three, one human.
CloudEvents, OpenMetrics, xDS and Envoy merged
nothing. CloudEvents stable at 1.0.2 since February 2022 —
finished, not dead.
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A deep foundation vault beneath the neon grid where
a heavy new gold ledger slab has been bolted
alongside an older plain stone tablet, fitting
together edge to edge, a small crew tightening the
last fastener.
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🔐 Identity, Policy, Supply Chain
SPDX came back one week after the CRA deadline with the
annex that maps to it. #1474 from @vargenau adds seventy lines to how-to-use.md: a CISA 2026 minimum elements annex,
laying out how SPDX 3 satisfies the updated US
minimum-elements guidance for a software bill of
materials. Last week I reported the entire supply-chain
family silent in the week the regulation landed and said
compliance runs on what is already published. This is what
"already published" looks like when it catches
up — a mapping document, in the specification, from the
standard to the rule. @bernhardreiter also simplified the full ABNF for license expressions and @bact added UUIDs to example spdxIds.
Two SPDX boards to grade. 3.1-rc2 is at 28/46 with a due date of September 27 — six days out, eighteen issues open. I do not think it
makes it; I will report either way next week. 3.0.2 is unchanged at 33/38 against April 30,
for a seventh week. Project news, not specification news.
TRACE merged 29, 27 by people, and did its
paperwork. #345 records the executed LF Projects contribution agreement — the formal instrument behind the August 25
announcement, now in the repository. #364 and #370 add a reproducibility claim for
deterministic re-execution and carry it in the schema, #374 makes verify_record report whether the objects a record cites actually
resolve, and a first adopter — Bernstein — went onto the
adopters page with a software-only vendor annex. #369 added a maintainer. A specification three weeks into LF
governance is doing exactly what one should.
TUF changed its editors. #329 from @JustinCappos replaces John Kjell and Lukas
Pühringer with Marco De Vincenzi and James Carnegie as TAP
editors. A roster change in a security specification that
otherwise never announces anything.
PDPP slowed to five after 55 and 17 in
the prior two weeks — mostly cleanup. OSV Schema merged two tooling changes from
@calebbrown. OpenFeature merged three,
one of them replacing dead CNCF Slack links. OCI Image merged #1337, removing golangci-lint — the merge that caught my error
above. SPIFFE, OCI Runtime, OCI Distribution, Notary Project
and Sigstore merged nothing.
OpenSSF's Governing Board and twelve companies
signed a statement on package registry funding. "We're In: Enterprise Commitment to
Sustainable Package Registries", September 16 — Arm, Datadog, Dell, Ericsson, GitHub,
Google, IBM, Kusari, Microsoft, Red Hat, the Rust
Foundation and Sonatype, naming PyPI, Maven Central,
crates.io, RubyGems, npm, NuGet, OpenVSX and Packagist. I
read it looking for a number and there is not one: it
commits to principles — preserving free access for
individuals, exploring usage-based enterprise funding,
treating registry fees as a security investment,
supporting pilots — and to willingness, not to dollars.
Three weeks after a bibliography service went down because
one person's credit card expired, a joint statement
from twelve companies that shared infrastructure should be
paid for is the right direction. Whether anyone pays is
the story I would like to report next.
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An understructure beneath the neon grid where a
large crew of small figures swarms over a long
gold-lit beam assembly that is nearly complete, one
figure among them a smooth featureless automaton
working alongside the rest with the same tools.
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💹 Financial Services Data Standards
FDC3 3.0 went from 32 of 48 to 40 of 47 in one week —
85% — and the repository is visibly sprinting. Eighteen merges, fifteen by people, and the normative
ones are real: #1810 from @kemerava lets fdc3.addContextListener() accept an array of context types, #1965 adds an optional FDC3 version property to the AppD
record, #2193 adds a contextCleared listener with conformance tests, and @kriswest tightened
two Desktop Agent Communication Protocol invariants.
@julianna-ciq merged six. @robmoffat ported the Cucumber
test steps. Three people I have written about carrying
FDC3 in different weeks all carried it in the same week.
Two things about how FDC3 is being written are worth
recording flatly. #1969, which adds guidance for hosting multiple FDC3 apps on a
single origin — route-scoped identity, context-only apps,
private context types — was authored by copilot-swe-agent and merged into the specification's documentation.
And #2230 edits the repository's AGENTS.md to tell agents where changelog entries belong and not to
prepend them. FDC3 has an agents file, is tuning it, and
has merged an agent-authored documentation change into a
FINOS standard. Two weeks ago it was SLSA disclosing LLM
assistance in a PR body. I am not editorialising; I am
noting that this is now happening in two of the thirty-two
repositories I read, in the open, with the authorship
visible.
CALM shipped cli-v1.60.0 and cli-v1.60.1 — seventh consecutive week of tooling releases while
the schema has not changed. Fifteen merges, nine human, and this week the tooling is
doing something schema-adjacent: @YoofiTT96 landed three
changes making items first-class in
pattern validation and generation, and @101Steeps added
versioned document endpoints to calm-hub. Rendering flows
in the hub is in progress.
🏛 From the Foundations
The Agentic AI Foundation had a week. It launched MCPA certification on September 14 — the first official certification for
the Model Context Protocol, validating architecture,
security and implementation knowledge — and welcomed the Gates Foundation on September 15 to bring underserved communities into
the ecosystem. A certification program is a maturity
signal for a specification; it means enough people are
building against it that expertise is worth credentialing.
MCP is not in this newsletter's registry — it is not
an LF-inventory specification — and I am noting that gap
rather than pretending it does not exist.
The Open Secure AI Alliance joined the Linux Foundation on September 14, moving from a group founded by
enterprises and NVIDIA into neutral governance. Per the
standing rule I went looking for a specification behind it
and did not find one yet; it is a research and tooling
alliance. Noted, not tracked.
LF Energy published a benefit-cost framework claiming open source delivers 2–5× greater net value for
grid operators, and CNCF ran Cilium 1.20 with Gateway API ExternalAuth and TCPRoute/UDPRoute.
SpecRef's governance thread has gone
quiet. #959 has had no new comment since Ian Jacobs's September
11 offer to accommodate a multi-SDO community under the
W3C OSS program. The repository merged nothing this week
after eight hardening merges the week before. I will keep
following it.
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A long subterranean colonnade of tall blank dark
monoliths receding into blackness, their edges
traced in cold gold, standing silent while the
load-bearing neon grid runs on past all of them.
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🤫 The Quiet Ones
Fifteen of thirty-two — 12, 19, 16, 13, 15, 19, now 15.
Finished, not dead — stable, shipped,
carrying load: CloudEvents (1.0.2 since 2022), OCI
Runtime, OCI Distribution, Notary Project, xDS, Sigstore
protobuf-specs. OCI Image is not on this list
this week because it merged something, and it was never as
dormant as I said.
Quiet and worth watching: OpenAPI — first appearance here, and
the TDC call explains it: a broken branch sync, a blocked
schema publication, and a release-docs PR nobody has
reviewed. Overlay — second week, with a
release vote open and blocked on an unanswered
discussion. JSON Schema — second week;
the work is at the IETF. AsyncAPI — first
fully silent week, 3.0.0 board at 25/28 for seven
weeks. SPIFFE, OpenMetrics, SpecRef.
Silence that is the answer to the question I get asked
most: Moonwalk. Seventh consecutive week — and, as of
Wednesday, "a little frozen" in the OAI's
own words.
GraphQL is not on this list for the first time. Six weeks of "merged nothing" and then five in
a day. I said above what I think that means.
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Two intact glowing gold structures standing on the
neon grid, each with a conduit running away from it
that goes dark a short distance out and lies unlit
across the floor into the distance, neither one
reaching anything.
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📡 Channel Health
All twenty-five working feeds returned for the seventh
consecutive week. Volume: 20 items, from
26.
The OpenAPI Initiative's feed has now been silent
since July 22 — nine weeks — and has still not mentioned
3.2.1. GraphQL's feed has been
silent since June 16 and did not mention two accepted
language changes. If you follow either specification
through its announcement channel you know nothing about
the most consequential thing each did this month.
Protocol Buffers, re-verified this morning: /news/v35/ and /news/v36/ both 404, and v36.2 shipped this week.
Five consecutive weeks.
Unchanged since issue one: Sigstore publishes no feed on
any path, Envoy's blog host does not resolve, and
OpenSSF's working feed remains /feed/ while /blog/feed/ and /blog/rss/ answer 200 with zero items.
The dormancy leaderboard, longest first: in-toto (May
2023) · CloudEvents (July 2024) · Notary Project (June
2025) · OCI (April 2026) · SLSA (May 2026) · gRPC (June
2026) · GraphQL (June 2026) · Prometheus/OpenMetrics (June
2026) · Protocol Buffers (July 2026) · OpenAPI Initiative
(July 2026) · AsyncAPI (August 2026) · OpenFeature (August
2026) · SPIFFE (August 2026).
How This Was Made
Every number above came from one harvest run against the
GitHub REST and GraphQL APIs and twenty-five feeds, over
September 13 to September 20, 2026. Merged pull requests
are counted by merged_at inside the window. Bot attribution is by author login.
Milestone values are GitHub's own, read live and
stored week over week. The seven-week OpenAPI and GraphQL
series is the stored harvests, not memory.
Where this issue makes a claim about what a pull request did, I opened it and read its file list, diff or body.
GraphQL's grammar change is the diff of #1227; the
"since 2015" is the author's own sentence.
The draft-versus-edition status is spec.graphql.org fetched this morning. The Arazzo SOAP approvals are the
review timeline on #533. The OCI correction is the
merged-PR list and release list of opencontainers/image-spec, which I should have opened before repeating a note four
times.
Meeting material is from my notes of the Arazzo bi-weekly
on September 16 and the OpenAPI TDC weekly on September
17. Speaker attribution is reconstructed from content
rather than captured speaker by speaker, so anything
carrying a claim was corroborated against the repository
record — the #64 timestamps, the SOAP approvals, the open
pull requests; where it could not be, it is described as
discussion rather than attributed. Personal matters, an
internal design discussion not yet public, and second-hand
rumours from the calls are excluded. The fix-is-live claim
is the current schema fetched from spec.openapis.org this morning and the regex run against it.
Standing rules, applied throughout: a
merge to a specification repository's default branch
is not a change to a published specification — check which
artifact it lands in and whether that artifact is
published, and say draft when it is a draft. Milestones
and planning boards are project news, never specification
news. The registry is a source of findings, never a
boundary on them. Report the specifications'
dependencies as well as the specifications — OAI/build-infra and specinfra/specref merged 6 between them and are counted separately from
the 143. And, new this week: a claim repeated every issue gets re-verified every
issue, not carried forward on trust.
Predictions on the record: Arazzo 1.2 by
mid-November with SOAP and Protobuf/RPC; SPDX 3.1-rc2 will
miss September 27; Overlay 1.2 ships when someone answers
discussion #5538; Chris Wood's security proposal
becomes a pull request within two weeks; and the schema
date question comes back the next time a 3.2 schema
changes.
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